About 2 years ago I purchased a group of 5 Ngara flametails at about 1". Ended up being 3 males and 2 females. Well the males made short work of eachother, none of which lived for too long. However the females flourished and I eventually put them into my 125 of mixed everything. Well for 2 long years i've been staring at my last two brown surviving females when one morning one of their heads was bluish.

This fish is almost 3 years old and almost 4" and JUST started to color up. I've been waiting to post this for the past week just to make sure it wasnt sick and just looked different. but no the head is more blue and the orange is coming in under the shoulder now.

Now the other males started to color up at 2", why did it take this guy soo long to color up?

Hmmm, that is definitely not the norm......

My only guess would be that maybe it took this long for him to feel comfortable enough in the mixed tank to show color.

I moved this to the Malawi section, and hopefully Larry will chime in since he has way more experience with Peacocks than I do.

Any pics??

Thats all that I could come up with myself. Needless to say im pumped regardless of the reason.

Chances are that being in a male heavy group not coloringup kept him alive initially. Then circumstances as they were he wasn't comfortable enough to show true colors. Put him in a seperate tank with the other ?girl? And he should brighten up rather quickly.

Keeper

I guess it did keep him alive by not showing color early on, good for him. The other one is definitely a girl, the more i look at the two the tip of their dorsal fin and anal fin are different plus i've noticed her holding eggs for a couple days on two seperate occasions. I wish i did have another tank to give the two of them but i really dont at the moment. He is showing more and more color everyday though so i am very excited.

Thanks for the responses


This post has been edited by bk1300: Feb 8 2010, 03:29 PM

I've had latent males before, but not for 3 years! After all that, it's great you ended up with a pair.

tell me about it, i was like you gotta be kidding me all 3 males die and leave me with 2 female peacocks. Now it's time to cross the fingers and hope for lil baby ngara in the rocks.

oooooo weeeeee he's coloring up nicely. I'm gonna borrow my fathers camera this week so I'll take some nice shots of my fish.